The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  1.Attraction to and enjoyment of military or pseudomilitary roles.

  2.Mercenary-pragmatic interests: they were attracted by tangible benefits and wanted to improve their lives.

  3.Belief in Nazi ideology.

  4.A wish to be a professional soldier, which was impossible to fulfill because of the limit placed on the army by the Versailles treaty.

  The interviewees often said they were ignorant of the true nature and purpose of the SS. This could be the case with later “tasks” but is not likely with regard to earlier ones, the violent promotion of the Nazi movement.

  Many of the early followers said they saw few alternatives to the SS, since they had little training or education that would have helped them secure employment. However, many other Germans were in a similar position during the depression. Those who joined and remained in the SS had to have some special predisposition for the SS role. Moreover, many joined during the economic expansion under Hitler’s rule, when other opportunities did exist.

  On a questionnaire measuring authoritarianism (conformity and pronounced authoritarian-antidemocratic attitudes) former SS members scored substantially higher than former members of the German armed forces. This may have resulted from self-selection or experience or both. Both SS members and armed forces members shared certain, possibly common, German cultural characteristics: loyalty and honor held in higher esteem than justice; Mein Kampf read before 1933; past military or semimilitary activity regarded with satisfaction; and preference for dictatorial or monarchic government. SS members tended to see a great historical threat to German institutions and ideals.14

  Steiner suggests an explanation of SS violence:

  We propose to advance the concept of the “sleeper” who lies dormant until circumstances or specific events will activate him or her and produce behavioral traits not apparent before. Extreme deprivation coupled with powerlessness at one end of the spectrum and the assumption of considerable power, causing elation or ecstatic joy on the other, tend to produce the necessary conditions and thereby passions which can activate the sleeper. As Erich Fromm pointed out, “people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically just as people with a loving character wait for the opportunity to express their love.” Fromm’s findings are supported by this writer’s observations of former members of the SS during and after the Third Reich. The shifts occuring in the display of personality characteristics when social conditions change radically is absolutely striking. The sadistic-prone – or authoritarian – character, who may have played a meek or even friendly role under one set of circumstances, may become an absolutely destructive individual in a totalitarian terroristic society in which aggression is rewarded. By contrast, such behavior may be discouraged in a democratic society and therefore less aggression may be expressed.15

  Steiner’s account suggests that self-selection as well as changed circumstances were especially important. The changeability implied by the sleeper concept is a matter of degree. Most persons are sleepers to some degree, inasmuch as they have a violent potential that can be triggered by specific conditions. Only a limited number of SS members were likely to have sleeper characteristics to a high degree. Others had to evolve more. Early joiners had to like or feel comfortable with confrontation and violence and with authoritarian structures and the Nazi ideology: they required less change. To different degrees, changes in their environment – difficult life conditions, membership in the SS, Nazi rule, and changes in Germany – brought forth motivations and aspects of the selves of the SS that previously might have been dormant. This is consistent with the principle that different environments or circumstances activate different motives. The environmental changes, whether self-selected or imposed, also led to new experience, “resocialization,” and personal change. Thus, self-selection does not mean that most who joined the SS were ready to become mass murderers as soon as their environment allowed it.

  Learning by participation

  The SS training required and inculcated extreme willingness to endure danger and submit to authority. Fighting and occasionally killing were demanded from the start.c The training, shared experience, and privileges created a strong group tie. Ordinary rules and prohibitions did not apply to the SS either legally or psychologically. Deindividuation resulting from their group membership and joint actions further broke down moral prohibitions. Ideological indoctrination made killing Jews the fulfillment of a “higher” ideal. Their acts of violence provided constant learning by participation and increased the psychological possibility and ease of greater violence.

  In March and April of 1933, tens of thousands of potential “enemies” of the state were rounded up by the SA and SS and placed in concentration camps. Many were indiscriminately murdered. In late 1933 Dachau, where many such murders occurred, was reorganized into a highly efficient facility in which systematic, policy-based brutality was institutionalized, although capricious individual brutality was discouraged. After 1934 the concentration camps were under SS control. The SS also had the lead role in the purge in which the leader of the SA, Röhm, and many other prominent SA leaders were killed. This greatly diminished the influence of the SA, which was a larger, but less well trained, reliable, and loyal Nazi paramilitary organization.

  The SS also became responsible for internal security. It operated the secret police, the Gestapo, which was notorious for its reign of terror and torture in Germany and later in the occupied territories. The SS was responsible for party security and intelligence (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD); it also provided concentration camp guards (Death’s Head Units) and the general service battalions that later became its military arm, the Waffen SS. Transfers among these units were common, partly to maintain the unity of the organization.

  Before the war the SS, together with the SA, enforced boycotts of Jewish business and beat up and occasionally killed Jews. On November 9, 1938, they broke into Jewish homes, killed Jews, deported many Jews to concentration camps, and burned down synagogues and other Jewish institutions. This was the famous Kristallnacht, crystal night, named for the broken glass produced by the night’s destruction.

  When the war started, small SS units accompanied the army and fought so well that the size of the Waffen SS was greatly expanded. The Waffen SS too participated in civilian massacres and the killing of prisoners. Accompanying the army were special SS detachments or “task forces” (Einsatzgruppen), directed to seize intelligence information and round up troublemakers. They came to be known for swift, brutal action. They murdered the leaders of the Polish people – doctors, intellectuals, lawyers, priests, government officials, teachers. They isolated Jews in ghettos and later transported them to special areas.

  Four Einsatzgruppen were created specifically to murder Jews in territories conquered by the advancing German army. These groups received special training, which included further propaganda against Jews. They followed the army, gathered Jews, and shot them, sometimes after they had forced them to dig the trench that was to serve as their grave. During the summer and fall of 1941, about 500,000 Jews were killed.

  Killing face to face, the Einsatzgruppen were exposed to the immediate sensory consequences of their acts: tangled naked bodies (including women and children) lying in trenches, the squirming of those not immediately killed. This resulted in nightmares, heavy drinking, nervous breakdowns, and even suicides. Dying and dead bodies are indiscriminate in their humanness: this explains their impact on perpetrators who accepted and even favored the idea of killing Jews.

  The Nazis did not begin to question the goal. The process had too much momentum; the idea of turning back did not arise. Their prevailing mindset led the SS to ask how to do it better, not whether to do it at all. Once a goal is established, a commitment to it develops, and a system is created to fulfill the goal, difficulties need not lead to its abandonment. If anything, the difficulties led to renewed commitment to exterminate the Jews of Europe and get rid of the “problem” forever.

>   A series of changes in methods followed. First, an SS auxiliary was organized from ethnic groups in Russia, mainly Ukrainians, who were militantly anticommunist and powerfully anti-Semitic.d16 The Ukraine was the land of pogroms; cultural preconditions were present for Ukrainians to become part of the machinery of mass killing. By the middle of 1942, these SS auxiliaries were heavily engaged in the murder of Jews.17

  Another innovation was to fill a large van with Jews, route the carbon monoxide exhaust back into the van, and drive it around until everyone inside died. Special units of Jewish prisoners, the Sonderkommando (literally, special command) were forced to unload the bodies. The vans were later replaced by the extermination camps, in which victims were killed in gas chambers disguised as communal bath or shower rooms. This method was used to kill three to four million Jews – the vast majority of those murdered by the Nazis.

  At Auschwitz, the largest extermination and forced labor camp, cyanide gas (Zyklon B) was used for efficiency and “humanitarian” reasons – the speedy death of victims. Jews arrived in cattle cars. Many were immediately sent to the gas chambers; Jewish prisoners then removed gold teeth and hair (to be used in mattresses) and burned the bodies in great ovens. Others were selected for forced labor in many enterprises, includng SS-run factories and I.G. Farben, the huge chemical company. They were slowly starved to death on inadequate rations. Some were taken to gas chambers when they weakened. Others simply died. Some were killed in camp hospitals by injections into the heart; some were executed for an infraction of one of the many camp rules. Others died from one of the imaginative Nazi punishments, such as packing many people into a tiny cell without an air supply. Although directed by SS guards and supervised by Nazi doctors, the extermination process itself was now mostly in the hands of the Ukrainian guards, who herded Jews into the gas chambers.

  Many of the SS who set up the camps and then remained as personnel were veterans of the euthanasia program and thought of themselves as having special skills or expertise. They could focus their attention on the use of their professional skills. In a public television interview a medical orderly, a transfer from the euthanasia program who had administered deadly injections, described himself as a knowledgeable technician who helped prisoners to a relatively painless death.

  The Nazis recognized the importance of making victims seem less than human. Inmates were kept hungry and helpless; they were forced to live in filth and urinate and defecate on themselves. One purpose was to reduce the will to resist by weakening them physically and destroying their former identity and sense of dignity. Another purpose was to diminish the victims and “help” the SS distance themselves from them. Gita Sereny asked Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka: “If they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?” “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies – to make it possible for them to do what they did” was the answer.18

  The interweaving and merging of role and person

  Given the initial self-selection, the progressive identification with the institution, the evolution of the SS into a system devoted to mass murder in the context of changes in the larger system of Germany, and learning through participation, the psychological condition of many SS members came to fit the role they were to fulfill. They became well adapted to their functions, following the rules and operating procedures and treating their victims as contaminated material to be disposed of.

  The “ideal” SS man was not personally brutal and did not enjoy the suffering of victims. He could even treat individual Jews well while serving the machinery of their murder. This level of development is demonstrated by a fictional character, O’Brien, in George Orwell’s 1984. O’Brien, the torturer of Winston Smith, inflicts indescribable pain and terror, but does so in a kindly manner, as if it is a necessary task against his inclination. Dr. Wilhelm Pfonnerstiel, professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg and SS lieutenant colonel, reporting after the war on a wartime visit to the concentration camp at Belzec said: “I wanted to know in particular if the process of exterminating human beings was accompanied by any act of cruelty. I found it especially cruel that death did not set in until 18 minutes had passed.”19 He was also concerned about the welfare of the SS men administering the extermination.

  Not all SS members became “perfect.” Even in a total organization like the SS, some traveled unique paths. Despite self-selection some had initially greater capacity for empathy for Jews, whereas others had deep-seated hostility or found pleasure in harming people. As a result, what they learned from experience differed. Some SS may have brutalized victims to maintain a dehumanized view of them and their own commitment to murder. Although worse for the victims, this may represent a shakier commitment, a lesser capacity to accept murder as a normal operating procedure. Others were provoked by the victims’ helplessness and their lack of response to beatings and humiliations. People who need to experience power over others require a response or they will escalate violence.20

  In his book Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally describes the behavior of Amos Goeth, the commandant of the labor camp (later concentration camp) at Plaszow.e21 He would come out onto the balcony of his villa in the morning with a rifle and binoculars and scan the campground. When he saw a prisoner doing something that displeased him – pushing a cart too slowly, standing rather than moving, or committing some other unfathomable crime – he would shoot the prisoner. The life of any Jew in contact with him was in constant danger. He beat his Jewish maid mercilessly if he found the slightest speck of dirt or if his soup was not the right temperature. According to the reports of survivors Goeth believed, at least in his sentimental moods, that this Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, and others who worked for him were “loving servants.” This is also attested by the tone of a note asking her to send clothes and reading material when the SS arrested him for black marketeering. This man, who was even more cruel and sadistic than his SS role required, apparently had no capacity to see his behavior from the perspective of others.

  Research has shown that one type of incestuous father is an authoritarian tyrant who regards his wife and children as chattel. In addition to incest, he physically abuses members of his family.22 Amos Goeth may have been this kind of person, run amok in a system that has run amok. He was unable to appreciate that his prisoners, these “objects” in his possession, had feelings and needs of their own that did not fit his needs and preferences – a not uncommon human blindness but in this case extreme in degree.

  While understanding the perpetrators as individuals is important, an essential truth is that they acted in a system that allowed and encouraged behavior like Goeth’s. Jan Karski, a representative of the Polish Civil Directorate, witnessed even more random violence when he infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942 to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions he was to report to Allied and Jewish spokesmen in London and the United States. He found everywhere “hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children, the desperate cries and gasps of a people struggling for life against impossible odds.”23 Once a companion seized his arms and rushed him into a building, to a window:

  “Now you’ll see something. The hunt. You would never believe it if you did not see it yourself.”

  I looked through the opening. In the middle of the street two boys, dressed in the uniform of the Hitlerjugend, were standing. They wore no caps and their blond hair shone in the sun. With their round, rosy-cheeked faces and their blue eyes they were like images of health and life. They chattered, laughed, pushed each other in spasms of merriment. At that moment, the younger one pulled a gun out of his hip pocket and then I first realized what I was witnessing. His eyes roamed about, seeking something. A target. He was looking for a target with the casual, gay absorption of a boy at a carnival.

  I followed his glance. For the first time I noticed that all the pavements about them were absolutely deserted. Nowhere within the scope of thos
e blue eyes, in no place from which those cheerful, healthy faces could be seen was there a single human being. The gaze of the boy with the gun came to rest on a spot out of my line of vision. He raised his arm and took careful aim. The shot rang out, followed by the noise of breaking glass and then the terrible cry of a man in agony.24

  In the reciprocal evolution of system and persons, some SS and other Nazis (the Hitlerjugend in Karski’s report) came to enjoy their limitless power over other humans. The freedom to completely control others’ lives and bodies might give some people a dizzying sense of power or perhaps the experience of both abandonment and strength as in an intense sexual experience. Their background and experience also prepares some people for sadistic pleasure, which develops out of a history of connection between one’s own pleasure and others’ pain.

  One’s own advantage or satisfaction can be regularly associated with others’ disadvantage or suffering: a bully might forcefully take away toys from other children; rivalry may lead to good feelings when a sibling suffers. Past hurts or feeling diminished can lead people to feel elevated relative to others who suffer. Satisfactions gained from power and from others’ suffering can fuse. SS members had many experiences that taught sadism. Coming to enjoy their victims’ suffering also had a special function: it could erase doubt and make “work” satisfying. The SS could also feel satifaction from successfully combating “evil.”